August 2, 2015

The Slate Chimes In

This review in Slate magazine mentions something I meant to put in my review.

Bird begins with his superheroes being interviewed by an unseen documentarian with a handheld-camera, and they go in and out of focus as they get excited and the cameraman tries to keep them in the frame. Clever! This is another trend in modern fantasy, from the last Spider-Man picture to Comedy Central’s satirical superhero "reality show" Drawn Together: bringing our pop-culture legends down to earth by having them discourse mundanely about their mythic jobs.

By and large the critics are giving The Incredibles two thumbs up. However, there are the sourpusses (The Village Voice, for one) who think Pixar has flown the coup with this one. I think they’re being over critical in terms of what might have been in the picture, instead of reviewing the film Bird decided to make.

As they say in the Slate review:

There’s nothing profound here: The Incredibles is a pop-culture parody, a couple of cuts above a sitcom. But it’s so funny, so gorgeous, and finally so moving when the superhero family gets to bust out and do what they were designed to do, that it transcends its sometimes conventional thinking